When you ask Dr. Jess Plaza what makes Evanston-Skokie School District 65 special, she doesn't start with programs or platforms. She starts with people. "We spend a lot of time really talking about and thinking about how we support everybody in our community," she says. As Director of Schools Management she has spent years helping the Illinois district turn that belief of supporting everyone into daily practice, especially when it comes to keeping students safe and well.
Now, District 65 has reshaped its approach to student safety and social-emotional learning, building a proactive system that supports the whole child. Branching Minds and Canopy Case Management played a part but the vision belongs to the district's educators.
Like many districts, District 65 had data that told an uncomfortable story.
Student engagement was low.
Chronic absenteeism had climbed to about 21%.
A disproportionate number of behavioral referrals were going to students of color, a pattern the district knew it had to address directly.
Meanwhile, families were asking a fair question: What does social-emotional learning actually look like in our schools, and how is it supported?
Underneath all of it sat a challenge familiar to every school safety team: How do you identify the students who need help before a hard moment becomes a crisis?
For years, the district's process leaned reactive. Teams would gather to problem-solve only after a student had several major incidents. As Dr. Plaza put it, support often started with the mindset of needing "to do something about this kid."
She and her colleagues wanted to flip that script entirely.
District 65's educators made a simple decision that changed everything: Treat behavior and social development needs the same way they already treated academics:
Screen for them.
Plan for them.
Monitor progress.
Build a team around them.
The district built dedicated social-emotional learning time into the school day for every grade level, pre-K through eighth. This wasn't a filler block or independent reading in disguise. It became a district-wide commitment to common language, so that students in every building hear the same definition when a teacher talks about respect or responsibility.
That consistency does something powerful for safety. "School should be the most predictable place that you're going to find," Dr. Plaza explains. Predictable routines help students stay regulated and feel they belong, which heads off many problems before they start.
But a strong Tier 1 doesn't mean every student's needs are met at Tier 1. When a student needs more, that same common language carries through: District 65 teams identify what's needed at Tier 2, Tier 3, or beyond, and build the corresponding SEL intervention plans directly in Branching Minds.
Rather than waiting for those "five huge explosions," the district began administering an SEL survey twice a year, alongside its academic assessments. The survey captures both teacher input and student self-reporting for students in second through eighth grade, giving teams a fuller, more honest picture of each child's needs. That screener data is integrated into Branching Minds alongside academic data, so teams are looking at the whole child, not just one piece of the picture.
District 65 stood up safety teams in every building, intentionally pulling together different perspectives. A typical team includes:
These teams meet at least monthly to review climate and safety data: behavior referrals, attendance, response calls, and threat or risk assessments. To bring that safety data into the same place as behavior referrals, attendance, and intervention plans, the district added Canopy Case Management to Branching Minds. When a concern surfaces, one staff member runs the structured assessment in Canopy while another pulls up the student's full history in the same place, so decisions rest on multiple data points rather than a single moment.
By treating safety and social-emotional learning with the same rigor as academics, and by giving teams one place to see the full picture, District 65 earned measurable results over two years:
The numbers are important but the bigger win is the shift that has happened in their culture. Now it looks like a team using data to problem-solve together, with the goal of repairing harm and teaching new skills, rather than just reacting.
That's the shift District 65 set out to make: from reacting to crises to preventing them, and from a few people carrying the weight to a whole community sharing it.
Dr. Plaza is quick to remind other leaders that this work doesn't require a brand-new initiative. The data is likely already in your buildings, in your behavior logs, your attendance records, and even your health office visits. The job is to bring it together, talk about it openly, and give it equal footing with academics.
For district leaders and school safety teams ready to take that step, Evanston-Skokie District 65 offers a clear, encouraging example. With a strong vision, the right teams, and tools that keep the work centralized, you can build a place where every student feels safe, supported, and ready to learn.
🎧Listen to the conversation with Dr. Jess Plaza on the Schoolin' Around Podcast.
To bring threat assessments and suicide risk screenings into one trusted place, the district adopted Canopy Case Management. Because Canopy lives within Branching Minds, where the district already tracks behavior referrals and intervention plans, safety teams stopped jumping between five different systems to do one job.
That single change gave leadership something they'd never had: a clear, district-wide view of student safety. Dr. Plaza describes the shift this way:
"Canopy is doing for us in the realm of school safety what Branching Minds did for us years ago, which is it's giving us insight into what is happening across our district, and allowing us to re-evaluate from a lens of safety and student behavior that we've never done before. So because we are gathering information on threat assessments and suicide risk assessments in one location, and we have data on what actions schools are taking as a result of those assessments."
Just as important, having all of this data in one place transformed the conversations educators were having about students. The old reflex to simply "do something about this kid" gave way to careful, evidence-based planning. As Dr. Plaza puts it: "There is no longer a need to “do something about this kid.” It's literally, here's all the data that we've looked at to help us determine if this child actually needs help."
⬇️ See how Evanston-Skokie School District 65 built connected systems that help teams coordinate threat assessment, document decisions, and support students from assessment through intervention.